“With great power comes great responsibility.”
Uncle Ben to Peter Parker, in Spider-Man1

In the last few months, I have had the privilege of teaching simultaneously two intensive seminary PhD seminars, one on the theology of religions, and one on the theology of culture. In surveying both the history and current state of play of these fields in such close proximity, I have been reminded that they each have classificatory typologies that cast long shadows over their disciplinary landscapes, or to be more accurate, typologies which have created our maps by which we orientate and navigate the terrain itself. Whether one ultimately finds them a pedagogical help or a hindrance, any responsible teaching and learning within these subjects at both undergraduate and postgraduate level have to engage with them, for they have largely set the terms of the debate and still continue to attract attention even if it is to critique and contest their continued usefulness.

Concerning the theology of religions, I am referring to Alan Race’s threefold typology of ‘exclusivism’, ‘inclusivism’ and ‘pluralism’ laid out in his 1983 book, Christians and Religious Pluralism.2 In a relatively new discipline, Race hoped to ‘bring order out of what is a potential chaos’,3 describing approaches to the religious Other across Christian history. For him exclusivism ‘counts the revelation in Jesus Christ as the sole criterion by which all religions, including Christianity, can be understood and evaluated.’4 Inclusivism locates salvation in Christ but what is distinctively inclusive ‘is to believe that all non-Christian religious truth belongs ultimately to Christ and the way of discipleship that springs from his way.’5 Pluralists, on the other hand, believe that ‘knowledge of God is partial in all faiths, including the Christian. Religions must acknowledge their need of each other if the full truth about God is to be available to mankind.’6

Concerning the theology of culture, I am referring to H. Richard Niebuhr’s five-fold typology described in his 1951 work, Christ and Culture, which ‘answers’ the ‘enduring problem’7 of ‘the relations of Christianity and civilization’:8 ‘Christ Against Culture’, ‘The Christ of Culture’, ‘Christ Above Culture’, ‘Christ and Culture in Paradox’, and ‘Christ the Transformer of Culture’.

The occasion of teaching about both of these typologies and their reception in some detail and in quick succession, coupled with my own continuing vacillation and wrestling on where I stand regarding their usefulness, has prompted me to reflect a little on the nature of typology in the task of theology and theological education.9 As Arthur Miller said, ‘Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.’10 It is helpful to clearly conceive of typologies as tools. In order to effectively use any tool you need to understand what it is, what it was created to do (including its necessary limitations) and then decide whether it can be of use. While the purpose of this column is not to rehearse debates around the validity and usefulness of the aforementioned typologies per se, it’s worth starting with these case-studies. Both typologies continue to have their defenders and detractors. All the main players writing in these two fields seem to have something to say on the matter.

1. A Tale of Two Typologies

In terms of Race’s three-fold typology, John Hick could say, ‘To my mind the simplest and least misleading classification’,11 and yet Gerald McDermott states that ‘the typology has collapsed’.12 Somewhat ironically, Paul Hedges offers his own typology in classifying objections to Race’s typology(!), attempting to counter the criticism that Race’s ‘exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism’ typology misconstrues the diversity of religions; that more or less options exist; that the categories are incoherent; that it cannot cope with the varieties of positions that exists; and that the terms are polemical.13 Believing he has countered these objections, and not persuaded by a number of new typologies-on-the-block, Hedge’s conclusion is for a continuation of the original typology with clarifications, plus the addition of a fourth category (which he calls ‘particularities’).14

While H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture and his five-fold typology is no doubt a Christian ‘classic’ and part of the theological ‘canon’ of twentieth-century works on social ethics, for some its status is that of infamy. ‘Few books have been a greater hindrance to the accurate assessment of our situation than Christ and Culture’, state Stanley Hauerwas and William Willamon.15 Drawing on John Howard Yoder’s criticism of the typology, Craig Carter notes that Christ and Culture ‘has persuaded many individuals from pietistic, Anabaptist and fundamentalist backgrounds to view their heritage of opposition to major aspects of the majority culture as something of which to be ashamed, and as something that needs to be discarded in order to become culturally responsible.’16 Conversely, in the fiftieth anniversary edition of Christ and Culture (again noting its longevity), James Gustafson, a former colleague and friend of Niebuhr writes ‘An Appreciative Interpretation’ as a preface, responding to the criticisms of Yoder and historian George Marsden (who himself had recently given an anniversary lecture on the book).17 Gustafson’s defence is written with some brio: ‘John Howard Yoder, whom Marsden cites so approvingly, for years circulated versions of a critique of Christ and Culture which is laced with more ad hominem arguments and fortified with more gratuitous footnotes than anything I have read by scholars in the field of Christian ethics.’18

To re-iterate, I am not concerned here with the debates that continue to swirl around these particular typologies in these particular disciplines. One can go and do the requisite reading and come to one’s own conclusions as to whether we should retain, amend, or discard Race and Niebuhr’s modelling. I am interested in taking a series of steps back to look at typology more generally. Of course, such reflection is far more common in both the social sciences and biological sciences. You and I may never have thought much about the methodology of typology, but don’t worry, others have, and in great detail. There’s a lot of iceberg below the surface. In fact, there is so much detail that, as someone who is not a trained social scientist or biological scientist, one can very quickly get lost down the rabbit-hole. While much of this subject matter doesn’t impinge on us as theological educators, periodically a little self-inspection is necessary for all of us, to act as methodological hygiene in remembering why we use typology, how we use it responsibly, and making sure we don’t abuse it given our God-given responsibilities. My apologies if the following is obvious to you and simplified, although given that typology is a tool to aid simplification, my comments might well be apposite.

2. Towards a Theology of Typology

Let’s take that first step back. Typology is a particular form of classification, ‘the general process of grouping entities by similarity.’19 As Bailey notes, ‘Classification is a very central process in all facets of our lives. It is so ubiquitous that not only do we generally fail to analyze it, we often even fail to recognize its very existence.’20 Although I have come across different definitions, ‘typology’ is distinguished from generic classification in that ‘a typology is generally multidimensional and conceptual’,21 whereas its close relative, ‘taxonomy’ (and the two are often used interchangeably), is distinguished from generic classification in that its focus is empirical, ‘the term taxonomy is more generally used in the biological sciences, while typology is used in the social sciences.’22

Typologies—defined as organised systems of types—are a well-established analytic tool in the social sciences. They make crucial contributions to diverse analytic tasks: forming and refining concepts, drawing out underlying dimensions, creating categories for classification and measurement, and sorting cases.23

But we might be getting ahead of ourselves.

Let’s take another step back and play the three-year old: Why is classification so central to our lives and why with something like typology do we find it necessary ‘to simplify and codify a considerable amount of nuanced, slippery, multi-faceted and varied data into simpler segments with common characteristics’?24 To help us teach and communicate? Yes, but why? Such questioning takes us another step back to the apparent universal human need for order and meaning in what might seem like a chaotic and meaningless universe. And now we can start getting philosophical and talk about the perennial questions concerning the relationship between the noumenal and the phenomenal, between unity and diversity, between the one and the many. And at this point Christians have a solid place to stand to attempt to address such issues, for we can take a further step back into theological anthropology and into the Garden in Genesis. It is there that we will find the building blocks, blueprint and bassline that will help us, ontologically, epistemologically and ethically, to move towards a Christian foundation for conceptualising and employing classification and typology.

God creates ex nihilo, brings order out of chaos and names. He creates human image-bearers who are mandated analogically as creatures to sub-create, to bring order out of chaos and to name. Watkin notes that ‘to name something is to call it out from the flux of the world as a figure, not just a background; it is to recognise in it the dignity of identity. This is the task and the privilege that God sets before Adam.’25 The cultural mandate to which humanity is called is the delegated God-given authority to fill and subdue the earth, to have dominion, to both tend (implying a measure of cultivation) and keep (implying a measure of conservation) the garden.

Most relevant for our enquiry is, of course, Genesis 2:19–20:

Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.

In terms of a theology of classification, we can make a number of observations.

First, this naming is surely to be patterned and related to God’s naming ‘according to its kind’ in Genesis 1:11, 12, 21, 25. Here we see in beautiful harmony both unity and the One (all creation is unified under the same Creator God, and held together in Christ), and diversity and the Many (creation is separated and subdivided into heaven and earth, land and sea, etc., and there is taxonomy established).

Second, Adam as sub-creator, is given an amazing privilege to be involved in the task of naming and classification, remembering, though, that he does this as a creature, image bearer, and vice-gerent, not as God. Concerning Adam’s task, Watkin notes:

It is neither completely passive nor active in an unconditioned way. Adam is not reduced to writing down names dictated to him by God, nor does he invent the different sorts of animals himself…. Modern accounts can have a tendency to see meaning as either fully formed and ready to be discovered, or as a product of human invention. A Christian philosophy of meaning could do worse that go via Adam’s naming of the animals, which is neither an unconstrainedly active creation of meaning ex nihilo nor an utterly passive reception of meanings that come to him from the outside. The world is neither meaningless or replete with meanings; God has created a world of meanings that human beings are invited to paracreate, under his authority and guidance.26

Third, such sub-creation should be recognised as an awesome, fearful responsibility to be proceeded upon with great care, given the authority and power one wields in the classificatory process. There is supressed truth in our late modern zeitgeist that classification is an exercise in power and dominion (although counter-culturally we would want to say, not necessarily an abuse of power and an exercise in domination). As speech-act theory tells us, our words are never purely descriptive but have a performative function that brings into being a new situation, where reality is reconstructed for hearer, reader, and student in a new way. Our words build worlds. This late modern suspicion of power is a God-given recognition of our sinful tendency to mis-classify and construct a false reality, sometimes out of ignorance and often for our own selfish ends. Both unregenerate non-Christians and regenerate Christians who are battling indwelling sin are always susceptible to this. Our neighbour who ought to be loved is easily sinned against in the process of being categorized wrongly. Conversely, the sinful nature will seek to serve itself by either choosing favourable nomenclature or resisting categorization at all.27 That last option might be taken for the sake of autonomy, just as the forbidden fruit was, resisting creatureliness and its common share in the created order. Alternatively, resisting categorization can be motivated by fear, for to accept a category would be to come into the light and acknowledge a position that is shamefully held. It was not for nothing that Adam and Eve hid from God. Once this is added to the recognition that there is no objective standpoint from which to dispassionately describe any aspect of human life or thought, then the creation of typologies can be seen to be complicated both theoretically and theologically.28

Fourth, as humans we seem compelled to make meaning, order, and classify. It’s hard-wired into us and inescapable. I suppose, in our vocations as teachers and learners, we could ‘down tools’ (which would involve winding-up Themelios, together with the market that provides its readers), but then we would be resisting that God-given cultural mandate, which itself would be selfish and sinful. While the dangers of succumbing to caricature, being simplistic, and skewing are always near, typology in our teaching can be the gift of bringing some measure of order to what can seem a morass of material, the gift of communication in being able to simplify that which is complex in order to aid understanding, the gift of orientation in giving a sense of stability to a discipline, the gift of exploration and creativity in constructing models to test hypotheses and further knowledge. Typology is the recognition that abstraction and generalization are features of our finitude, in time and space. For example, in teaching a course on worldview, while I fully recognize the unique dignity and individuality of every image-bearer in the world, I shouldn’t and can’t itemize and atomize eight billion instantiations of worldview. Neither I nor my students have the knowledge, the capacity, the patience, or the credit hours! And so, we classify. In classifying we clearly demonstrate we are human, not God, and yet in classifying we also demonstrate that we are images of God.

3. Guidelines and Guardrails for Typological Usage

Moving from the Garden and returning to the present, we are in a better position to trace some guidelines and guardrails in an ethical, and yes, Christian deployment of typology. To do this I want to return to Gustafson’s ‘appreciative interpretation’ of Niebuhr’s five-fold typology in Christ and Culture. Even if one doesn’t agree that Niebuhr does (or doesn’t do) what Gustafson says he does (or doesn’t do), Gustafson raises some characteristics of the deployment of typology which chime with our reflections in Genesis concerning our human finitude and fallenness and which make typology an inevitable, crucial, but ‘high-wire’ activity. The setting up of a typology, together with an explanation of our typological set-up is important. To return to our metaphor of typology as tools, it would not be fair to critique a tool because it fails to do y when it was created to do x. Countering his critics, Gustafson states that Niebuhr’s typology is not ‘a history of Christian theology’, nor is it ‘a systematic statement of Niebuhr’s theological ethics’, nor is it a ‘taxonomy of the writings of the authors used in the book’.29 Rather, Niebuhr is using a particular method of typology originated by the godfather of modern sociology, Max Weber (1864–1920), called the ‘ideal-typical’ method.30 Ideal-types are not ideal in the sense of being morally excellent, nor are they a mean, but are a constructed ideal to allow for analysis and comparison. They are heuristic devices helping readers to understand material to which they refer. I realise this may prompt a further definition concerning the nature of a ‘heuristic’:31 ‘a heuristic is a strategy that ignores part of the information, with the goal of making decisions more quickly, frugally, and/or accurately than more complex methods.’32 Unsurprisingly, heuristics is a field of study itself but for our theological and pedagogical purposes, we might say that a heuristic is both a ‘start’ and a ‘shortcut’ and need to be treated as such in terms of its introductory and provisional nature.33 In a similar vein, consider again Paul Hedges’s defence of the threefold typology in the theology of religions. To the criticism that ‘exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism’ can’t cope with the varieties of positions that exist, he notes that,

If it were presented as the be-all-and-end-all of everything that could be said, then I would concur with this critique. However, as a gently guiding analytic tool, seen to have hazy edges, and used primarily for heuristic purposes, to get to grips with the complexity of the subject area, then, I believe, the typology has a place.34

I think this is helpful, recognising that typologies are not set in stone but can be developed or discarded.35 They must not be held onto too tightly or dogmatically, with a pedagogical posture that reflects what we noted earlier about Adam’s classificatory creaturely task as sub-creator being neither ‘an unconstrainedly active creation of meaning ex nihilo nor an utterly passive reception of meanings that come to him from the outside.’36

Gustafson’s contention in his defence of Niebuhr is that his critics have not understood the ideal-type methodology and so have misunderstood his use of the typology.37 To further aid understanding, and admitting he cannot know Niebuhr’s motivation in writing Christ and Culture, Gustafson references an earlier 1942 essay by Niebuhr, ‘Types of Christian Ethics’,38 which Gustafson believes illuminates how Niebuhr is using his typology in the later Christ and Culture, thus answering some of the criticisms the later book faced. ‘Types of Christian Ethics’ opens with a section on ‘The Typological Method’. In Christian ethics, given the ‘confusion pluralism of principles and even greater multiplicity of historic individuals’,

[T]ypology seeks to understand these unique individuals, with the aid of ideal figures of types, that is, of relatively concrete models of combinations of interests or convictions. First of all, a type is a mental construct to which no individual wholly conforms. It must be used, therefore, not as a statement of necessary connections, so that the rational is given precedence over the empirical. Secondly, these mental constructs, if there are to be useful towards understanding, must be of one sort—that is to say: among the many variable factors which may be discerned in any concrete historical event, only one set can be chosen at a time to furnish material for the mental model…. Again, the typologist needs to remember that he is not constructing a value scale. His enterprise is directed toward neither explanation nor evaluation, but towards understanding and appreciation. If his types are well constructed, and so, empirically relevant, he will belong to one of the types himself and will have preference for it; but one purpose of typology is that of helping him understand his own type as one of many and so to achieve some measure of disinterestedness.39

Gustafson is of the firm opinion that Niebuhr, the genius theological educator, constructed his typology in Christ and Culture from ‘vast historical learning’40 to aid understanding, ‘his was an undogmatic mind, supported in part by his vast knowledge, by his sense of historical relativity, and by his personal scholarly humility’:41

Unlike many contemporary scholars, including theologians, Niebuhr consistently read first with a hermeneutic of appreciation, and then a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’. The empathetic read can grasp both the positive contributions and the limitations for each of the types, the reasons why each type is supported and supportable from the tradition, as well (in comparison with the other types) as why it is unacceptable to other Christian theologians and believers.42

Gustafson’s appreciation of Niebuhr may itself be an idealised portrait, but one from which the theological educator can learn and indeed might wish to emulate. One does not have to reject the myth of epistemological neutrality, nor does one have to forgo confessional prescription and normativity (and the categorisations of orthodoxy, heterodoxy and heresy with their implications for pastoral ministry43), to recognise that Christian classificatory description that loves the other well will try as much as possible to achieve that measure of appreciative disinterest, will characterise rather than caricature (obeying the Golden Rule44), and will be constantly on guard so as not to confuse description with prescription.

Go forth and typologise!

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[1] Spider-Man, directed by Sam Raimi (2002). Its first appearance was in the Marvel comic Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962) written by Stan Lee.[2] Alan Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions (London: SCM, 1983).[3] Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism, x.[4] Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism, 11.[5] Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism, 38.[6] Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism, 72. It’s interesting to note that Race’s original focus is on revelation and truth, and not as commonly supposed, focusing just on salvation. The conflation of these two loci has led to some of the confusion and debate concerning the typology.[7] The title of chapter 1.[8] H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 50th anniversary expanded ed. (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001), 1.

[9] As the reader, I hope, will have already realised, the focus of this editorial is not ‘typology’ in the ‘biblical hermeneutical typology’ sense.

[10] From Arthur Miller’s play The Price (1968).

[11] John Hick, review of Towards a Theology of Religions, by Glyn Richards, RelS 26 (1990): 175.

[12] Gerald R. McDermott, God’s Rivals: Why Has God Allowed Different Religions? Insights from the Bible and the Early Church (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007), 23.

[13] Paul Hedges, ‘A Reflection on Typologies: Negotiating a Fast-Moving Discussion’, in Christian Approaches to Other Faiths, ed. Alan Race and Paul M. Hedges (London: SCM, 2008), 17–33.

[14] Hedges, ‘A Reflection on Typologies’, 27–29.

[15] Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989), 40.

[16] Craig A. Carter, ‘The Legacy of an Inadequate Christology: Yoder’s Critique of Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture’, Mennonite Quarterly Review 76 (July 2003), https://www.goshen.edu/mqr/2003/07/july-2003-carter/.

[17] George Marsden, ‘Christianity and Cultures: Transforming Niebuhr’s Categories’, Religion Online, https://www.religion-online.org/article/christianity-and-cultures-transforming-niebuhrs-categories/.

[18] James Gustafson, ‘An Appreciative Interpretation’, preface to Christ and Culture, by H. Richard Niehbuhr, xxi–xxxvi.

[19] Kenneth D. Bailey, Typologies and Taxonomies: An Introduction to Classification Techniques (London: Sage, 1994), 1.

[20] Bailey, Typologies and Taxonomies, 1.

[21] Bailey, Typologies and Taxonomies, 4.

[22] Bailey, Typologies and Taxonomies, 6.

[23] David Collier, Jody LaPorte, and Jason Seawright, ‘Putting Typologies to Work: Concept Formation, Measurement, and Analytic Rigor’, Political Research Quarterly 65.1 (2012): 217–32.

[24] Hedges, ‘A Reflection on Typologies’, 21.

[25] Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2022), 99.

[26] Christopher Watkin, Thinking through Creation (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2017), 109.

[27] In his defence of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism, Hedges notes that ‘it is intellectually fashionable to claim to be outside these categories’ (‘A Reflection on Typologies’, 21).

[28] I am indebted to my former student and colleague, Dr David Shaw, for his insights in this paragraph.

[29] Gustafson, ‘An Appreciative Interpretation’, xxvi.

[30] See for example, Max Weber, ‘The “Objectivity” of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy’, in Collected Methodological Essays, ed. Hans Henrik Bruun and Sam Whimster (London: Routledge, 2012), 100–138. The original essay was published in 1904. There appears to be extensive literature concerning ideal-types. For a helpful summary see ‘Appendix 1’ in Richard Swedberg, ‘How to Use Max Weber’s Ideal Type in Sociological Analysis’, Journal of Classical Sociology 18.3 (2017): 1–16.

[31] From the Greek εὑρίσκω, meaning ‘serving to find out, or discover’, Gerd Gigerenzer and Wolfgang Gaissmaier, ‘Heuristic Decision Making’, Annual Review of Psychology 62 (2011): 451–82, at 454.

[32] Gerd Gigerenzer and Wolfgang Gaissmaier, ‘Heuristic Decision Making’, Annual Review of Psychology 62 (2011): 451–82, 454. Interestingly, two of the summary points of this paper are as follows: (1) Heuristics can be more accurate than more complex strategies even though they process less information (less-is-more effects); (2) a heuristic is not good or bad, rational or irrational; its accuracy depends on the structure of the environment (ecological rationality).

[33] George Marsden perhaps somewhat begrudgingly admits this in the conclusion of his own lecture (‘Christianity and Cultures’): ‘I should say in closing that they are introductory tools. They are useful primarily for getting people to begin thinking more clearly about these issues. Once that has happened they may want to modify the tools to suit their purposes and will likely want to keep them out of sight in their finished work. Like any typology they invite simplistic thought and too easy categorizing of other Christians. Nonetheless, if used properly, they can continue to be a rich resource for helping Christians think about their relationships to the world.’

[34] Hedges, ‘A Reflection on Typologies’, 21. A paragraph later he writes, ‘It was never the point of the typology to make everyone fit within it; the categories are fluid approaches, with permeable membranes, rather than restrictive and closed essences…. The categories are not mutually exclusive’ (p. 21). This too is Harold Netland’s conclusion on the typology: ‘we should not think of these as three clear-cut categories so much as three points on a broader continuum of perspectives.’ Harold Netland, Encountering Religious Pluralism: The Challenge to Christian Faith and Mission (Leicester: Apollos, 2001), 24. Weber himself calls ideal-types an ‘emergency safe havens until one has learned to find one’s bearings while navigating the immense sea of empirical facts’ (‘The “Objectivity” of Knowledge’, 133).

[35] Again, concerning the ‘exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralist’ paradigm, Gavin D’Costa (who was an early adopter of the typology) has more recently become critical of it. ‘The typology has been useful, like a raft crossing a river, to get to where we are now. But is the raft still useful?’ Christianity and World Religions: Disputed Questions in the Theology of Religions (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 34.

[36] Watkin, Thinking through Creation, 109.

[37] ‘Evaluation of the method requires knowledge of the method: of historical methodological controversy between the human and the natural sciences in which it was formed, and the precise claims that are made for what the method can and does not know.’ Gustafson, ‘An Appreciative Interpretation’, xxx. Again, and just to track with our other example of typology in the theology of religions, it might be said that it’s unfair to criticize the ‘soteriological’ focus of Race’s ‘exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism’ when, as I noted above, his original questions were broader questions concerning truth and revelation, not just ‘salvation’.

[38] Niebuhr’s essay is helpfully included in the fiftieth anniversary edition of Christ and Culture, xxxvii–lv.

[39] Gustafson, ‘An Appreciative Interpretation’, xxxviii. Again, at the end of this essay he writes, ‘Typology helps us to understand the infinite variety of creative morality in Christianity but every individual man or movement has a unique character which is inexplicable in terms of type alone the types of Christian morality are not measures of value’ (p. lv). Race himself acknowledges something similar in the setup of his three-fold typology: ‘Though the main intention of this study is to classify and arrange its material in a typological pattern, thereby concentrating on major selected theologians for that purpose, it is impossible for me to conceal my own predilections in the process … it cannot be avoided in a study of this kind, so it is as well to mention it at the outset.’ Alan Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions (London: SCM, 1983), 8.

[40] Gustafson, ‘An Appreciative Interpretation,’ xxxiii.

[41] Gustafson, ‘An Appreciative Interpretation,’ xxxii.

[42] Gustafson, ‘An Appreciative Interpretation’, xxxii.

[43] From a confessionally evangelical starting point, this is where Carson’s critique of Niebuhr’s typology is particularly strong: he notes the strengths and weaknesses of Niebuhr’s comprehensiveness, his handling of Scripture, Niebuhr’s assignment of historical figures, and Niebuhr and his relationship to the canon of Scripture. See D. A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited (Nottingham: Apollos, 2008), 31–66.

[44] ‘So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.’ Working out whether this Golden Rule has been broken is at the nub of the critique against the ‘exclusivism, inclusivism, pluralism’ typology particularly by those labelled ‘exclusivist’ who protest that the typology is pejorative and unflattering. Who would want to be an exclusivist today? However, Hedges defends this nomenclature: ‘If we employ a common advertising phrase, ‘it does exactly what it says on the tin’, then exclusivism excludes from salvation other faiths and their members and so should be termed as such. It is not the job of academic description to whitewash approaches and paint them in the best possible light that will keep their exponents happy’ (‘A Reflection on Typologies’, 22). Hedges may have a point, but isn’t it important that those labelled with a title feel some measure of comfort with it?

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